About

Hack The Beats is a place to watch music being made by code, and to play with it. Every song here is a short program. It runs in your browser, and what you hear is what the code on screen is doing at that moment.

How it started

I saw a TikTok of DJ Dave making music with code, live, and I could not stop thinking about it. It made me want to build my own take on the idea: a whole new, more sophisticated platform for DJing in the browser, where the code is the instrument and you can mix it like records.

I started that night and stayed up until 2 a.m. Four hours later, I had made this.

I hope you enjoy it, and I hope it inspires you to make some music of your own.

What you are looking at

The stage shows a song's code. Each note lights up as it plays, and the patterns draw themselves under the lines that make them. Nothing is a recording: the sound is generated as the code runs, so changing the code changes the music.

The songs are written in Strudel, a language for live-coding music in JavaScript. Anything you can play on strudel.cc can be played here.

What you can do

Anyone can press play on the featured beats, watch them work, and take their controls:

• Turn the knobs. Every slider() in a song becomes a knob on the deck and a slider in the code.
• Work the channels. Each labelled pattern is a channel with a level, a meter, mute and solo.
• Play the pads. Echo, filter drop, reverb wash, half-time, stutter and no drums, for as long as you hold them (or switch on Latch).
• Try a change. A song can suggest changes to its own code. Tap one: the line changes, and so does the music. Tap again to put it back.
• Find your way round the code. The song map lists a song's parts, knobs and the rest, with what each one does, read from the code. Click one to go straight to it.

The rest needs an account, which is free and takes one click with Google:

• Mix. Two decks play two songs at once, kept in time with each other, with a crossfader between them.
• Edit the code. Press Edit, change anything, and press Update (or Ctrl+Enter; ⌘↩ on a Mac). The music carries on with your change.
• Keep your own songs. Your version is saved to your account; the original is never changed, and your copy credits it. You can share one of your songs by link: anyone with the link can listen, play with its knobs, channels and pads, and keep a copy of their own that credits you.
• Record. Capture the mix as a WAV file.
• Make a video clip. A short vertical or square video of the code lighting up with the music, with the song's name, ready to post. It is made on your device as the music plays.
• Plug in a controller. Any knob, fader, pad or button can be bound to a MIDI controller.

Read the guide for the whole instrument, step by step.

The beats

Who runs it

Hack The Beats is owned and operated by Built By Signal LLC, a venture-building company that works under the name SIGNAL: builtbysignal.com.

Support the site

Hack The Beats is free: no ads, no paywall, no subscription. If it has had your head nodding, help us keep hacking the beats. Tell a friend who makes music, share a song you made, and wear the shirt.

Every shirt helps keep the site running, free, and full of new beats.

Buy a shirt

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Built on Strudel

The music engine is Strudel, the JavaScript port of TidalCycles, © Strudel contributors, licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3. Its source is at codeberg.org/uzu/strudel.

This site's own code is © Built By Signal LLC. It is free software under the same licence and comes with no warranty. You can download the source of this version (licence). The archive holds everything needed to rebuild the site, including the script that bundles the unmodified Strudel packages. The same code is on GitHub: github.com/BUILTBYSIGNAL/hackthebeats_com.

Songs and sounds

Each song is credited in its own code. Songs credited to other artists are their work, transcribed or arranged here, and stay theirs.

No sounds are stored on this site. Samples are fetched as a song plays from the public packs it names, which belong to their authors: Strudel's default drum machines, Dirt-Samples and soundfonts, and packs such as algorave-dave/samples, eddyflux/crate, switchangel/beginningtrance and kyrsive/ily2-sounds. Spoken words come from Shabda.

Contact

If something here is yours and you would like it credited differently or taken down, or you have a question, write to the site owner.